investment

By 2040 we expect that an additional one million people will live in Ireland, an additional two-thirds of a million people will work here. An ageing population and smaller family size mean that we will need an additional half a million homes to accommodate this growth. Project Ireland 2040 purports to address this. It consists of the National Planning Framework which sets out a spatial strategy for Ireland, to accommodate in a “sustainable and balanced” fashion these significant demographic changes. It is the overall Plan from which other, more detailed plans including city and county development plans and regional strategies will take their lead. Learning from past experience, the NPF is backed up by an infrastructure investment programme, the National Development Plan. This National Development Plan sets out the significant level of investment, almost €116 billion, which will underpin the NPF and drive its implementation over the next ten years. €91 billion in Exchequer funding for public capital investment has been allocated and will be supplemented with substantial investment by commercial State Owned Enterprises. This increased level of resources is expected to move Ireland close to the top of the international league table for public investment, from a low post-crash base. In short, the State’s infrastructure investment – the money – should be guided by and follow the Plan. That is what makes Project Ireland 2040 different and a significant innovation in Irish public policy. What is not different is that it does not have teeth, particularly to stop market-driven development that is incompatible with the vision. Project Ireland 2040 is about enabling all parts of Ireland to achieve their full potential. It seeks to move away from the current, developer-led, business as usual pattern of development, to one informed by the needs and requirements of society. This means seeking to disrupt trends that have been apparent over the last fifty years and have accelerated over the past twenty. It purports to aim to ensure that rather than have excessive population growth focused on Dublin – as is the current trend – that 75% of all population growth occurs in the rest of the country.The immediate priority is to increase overall housing supply to a baseline level of 25,000 homes a year by 2020, and then a likely level of 30-35,000 annually up to 2027. 112,000 households are expected to obtain social housing over the decade. A new €2 billion Urban Regeneration and Development Fund will aim to achieve sustainable growth in Ireland’s five cities – Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway – and other large urban centres, incentivising collaborative approaches to development by public and private sectors. It aims to secure at least 40% of future housing needs by building and renewing within our existing built-up areas, whether they be in the many villages and towns in need of regeneration or in our cities and larger towns where there are also huge opportunities for city and town centre regeneration. Of course the corollary of this is that an unsustainable 60% of future housing need will be met on green-field sites. It targets a level of growth in the Northern and Western, and Southern, Regions combined to at least match that projected for the East and Midland Region. It will support the future growth of Dublin as Ireland’s leading global city of scale, by better managing Ireland’s growth to ensure that more of it can be accommodated within and close to the city. It supports ambitious growth targets to enable the four cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford to each grow by at least 50% to 2040 and to enhance their significant potential to become cities of scale. It recognises the extent to which Sligo in the North West and Athlone in the Midlands fulfil the role of regional centres. It recognises Letterkenny in the context of the North-West Gateway Initiative and Drogheda- Dundalk in the context of the Dublin- Belfast economic corridor. It seeks to strengthen our rural fabric, by reversing town/village and rural population decline, by encouraging new roles and functions for buildings, streets and sites, and supporting the sustainable growth of rural communities, to include development in rural areas. That’s one- off housing. Anyone who follows this will see that there’s not much sense of anything being ruled out, and indeed almost everything seems to be ruled in. That suggests it won’t all happen. And the determinant of what happens and what doesn’t will, as usual, be the market – which will skew to Dublin and its hinterland, and of course one-off housing whose site costs are negligible (for those lucky enough to own rural land) but which pose difficulties for sustainability: economic, social and environmental. It costs more to service far-flung housing with broadband, and everything else. One might quibble with elements of the plan. Dr Edgar Morgenroth – Professor of Economics at DCU and a primary author of the document – said that plans for the €850m motorway between Cork and Limerick would undermine the proper growth of “second tier” cities in Ireland. He rejected claims by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that the motorway would encourage the cities to grow faster saying it would instead lead to sprawl. He told ‘Morning Ireland’ it was important “to put the infrastructure into the cities, not between them”. “Once you put the motorway between two cities what you’re doing is getting more sprawl. So you’re undermining your own strategy”, he said. Morgenroth also said that building a new motorway undermined a commitment by government to reduce carbon emissions. The NPF will also have “statutory backing” overseen, quasi-independently, by the new Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) – a key recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal.   Unfortunately this particulator Regulator will not regulate but rather advise others whose motivation may be political and short-termist. A regulator who does not regulate. There has been much light-free heat, led by Sinn Féin which even claimed to be seeking a legal opinion, about the failure of the government to put the NPF to a parliamentary vote but instead to include